Q&A
Audio or Security: It’s All Just Connecting Stuff
ADS General Manager Robert Di Cesare says the company will focus on developing its two new audio products before courting additional head unit manu- facturers.
Automotive Data Solutions (ADS) has the fortunate position of being just about everybody’s friend. That’s because the company doesn’t make competitive audio, video or security devices; it makes parts that make those devices work with factory systems. The company has established a strong name in vehicle security integration under the iDatalink brand, and this past CES, it introduced Maestro, its first interface designed to help integrate audio components. The Maestro recently began shipping. Mobile Electronics spoke with ADS General Manager Robert Di Cesare about the company’s path from security to audio, and what’s next.
ME: Maestro is your first foray out of the secu- rity interface business and into audio. How did this come about?
Di Cesare: Having gone through considerable growth in the first few years of our existence, we started looking at other opportunities where we could apply our expertise and our unique way of doing things. In early 2010, we performed a comprehensive study of the audio interface in- dustry and discovered that it looked a lot like the remote start industry of the early 2000s. Head unit manufacturers, faced with the chal- lenges of installing radios in increasingly complex cars, lacked the in-house expertise to tackle proprietary infotainment systems. Meanwhile, companies specializing in OEM in- tegration offered cumbersome solutions that required installers to choose from numerous vehicle-specific products. We determined that there were two main cat- egories of applications we needed to focus on: steering wheel interfaces and radio replace- ment interfaces. Leveraging our award-winning web-based firmware delivery mechanism, we de- signed two flexible pieces of hardware that were tailored for each application. Maestro SW is the only product installers need to interface with ana- log steering wheel controls. Meanwhile, Maestro RR provides both steering wheel interfacing and radio replacement functionality in one module. Both are flash-updateable to work with different
10 Mobile Electronics November 2012
vehicles without requiring different variants, and benefit from an intuitive online programming tool. In addition, they offer industry-exclusive features such as data connectivity with select Kenwood head units and the ability to program two func- tions to each steering wheel button.
ME: Was this a drastic shift for you? In what
way did it leverage your existing expertise? What did you have to do differently?
Di Cesare: A key factor in our success with our iDatalink brand of OEM integration modules is our corporate philosophy. We believe in flex- ible hardware powerful enough to handle many years’ worth of vehicle-specific software. In that way, the Maestro project wasn’t a drastic shift; it was more like a natural evolution of our compa- ny. We took our expertise in interfacing alarms and remote starters with vehicles and applied what we knew to interfacing radios. There are many similarities between the se- curity/remote start world and the audio world. For starters, the vehicle networks to which we connect are the same, so our engineering team already knew how to extract the necessary data from the vehicles. It meant we could streamline the development process. Similarly, we had ex- perience implementing custom communication protocols in our partners’ devices, so we knew how to handle the challenges of interfacing with Kenwood’s radios.
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